Blogging Tips

A few weeks ago I wrote about how to create your own template for WordPress. A type of design growing in popularity is the Magazine style theme. Probably because it comes across as a more professional look and is maybe a bit less overwhelming to first time visitors, as it typically only displays the most recent post in full, and then lists previous posts.

The first time I saw a magazine style theme was The Morning After from Arun Kale. There were others around but this caught my eye immediately. There are a lot more of these style of themes around now for you to download and play with.

However, if you want to perhaps take your own design and convert it to a magazine style then it’s not that hard to do. Using my original posts on creating your own template, we need to build on this.

The first step is to duplicate your usual multi post index.php page and save it as archive.php (if you haven’t already). This will then keep your archives and category pages listing your posts out as usual. Alternatively you could alter these pages to just have an index of all the posts.

So once you’ve duplicated the index.php, you need to then open up index.php to edit this for the front page. The code we can use follows:

[sourcecode language="php"]< ?php $postchk = TRUE;
if (have_posts()) :
while(have_posts()) :
the_post();

if ($postchk) :
$postchk = FALSE; ?>